


Quiet

by FrivolousSuits



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Experimental Style, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 16:37:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13685553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits
Summary: Harvey's written five drafts of his best man's speech and deleted them all, because how do you congratulate the man you love on his marriage to someone else?Louis tries to help.





	Quiet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elisexyz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/gifts).



> Written as a gift for elisexyz and her friend (you know who you are!). Special thanks to statusquoergo for being my sounding board.
> 
> Marvey ends up happy, but this is not a particularly fluffy fic; if that's what you're hoping for I would recommend looking elsewhere, maybe at this [fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13683120) by elisexyz.
> 
> Also, you may see hints of ships besides Marvey here (such as Machel or Larvey); they don't get together or anything.

Around ten at night, Louis snaps the latches of his briefcase shut and walks out of his office, heading for the elevators. Harvey’s office is dark and empty, but a light from the office at the other end of the floor catches his eye. Frowning, he does a U-turn and strides towards Mike’s office. “Mike, what the hell are you still doing here–”

He stops short when he finds _Harvey_ in Mike’s office, stretched out on the couch and staring at his laptop screen.

He’s slung his jacket on the back of a chair, loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt, revealing a sliver of skin, and Louis stutters for a moment before he can say, “Shouldn’t you be getting your beauty rest?”

“I don’t need rest for a natural condition,” he murmurs without looking up.

“Right,” Louis nods, blinking vigorously. “Right.” He closes his mouth and then opens it again. “But still, tomorrow’s a big day. Best man and all.”

“Which is why I can’t sleep in good conscience until I finish this.”

“This?”

“The speech.”

“Are you close to done?”

“Yeah.”

Louis knows that faux-jovial tone– Harvey’s bluffing, and not even doing a good job of it.

“Harvey.”

His eyes dart up, and he lets out a long sigh before turning his laptop for Louis to see the blank page.

“You don’t have anything written?”

“Nope.”

“Why the hell, Harvey–”

“Because I just deleted my entire fifth draft,” Harvey retorts, now looking up and scowling.

“Why?” Louis demands.

“Because it’s not good enough for him.”

“For god’s sake, you’re a lawyer, you write harder speeches every week.”

“It’s not just some old closing statement. He’s leaving, it’s _the_ closing statement.”

“So be honest.” Harvey rolls his eyes, but Louis persists, “I know it’s hard for you, but speak from the heart. Tell them how much they mean to you. Tell them how you know they’re going to be happy together.”

“What if I don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I don’t know that they’re going to be happy together?”

His eyes are fixed downwards as he mutters this, but Louis’s voice rises. “What do you mean, you don’t know? They’re a fairy tale, they’re meant to be together.”

“They sure say that a lot.”

Louis means to snap at him for questioning the grand love story of Mike and Rachel, but something quieter slips out. “Do you love him?”

“Sorry, what?”

Louis chuckles as he adds, “No, I just thought I’d ask the blunt question, in case it was the right one and you needed to talk to someone about it, and no one had ever asked you, so you’d never been able to talk about it even though you might have wanted to–”

He waits for Harvey to cut in, insisting, “No, no, _‘no’_ is the answer,” but there’s only silence. Hesitantly, he says, “Do you not know that quote? It’s from _Love, Actually_ , but maybe that’s not your type of–”

“I know where it’s from.”

There’s more silence. Louis tries to fill it: “There the best man’s really in love with the bride, but I’m assuming that’s . . . not the case here.”

“No.” Harvey gives a harsh scoff.

Then his eyes glance up to meet Louis’s for one short, vulnerable moment, and Louis finds himself frozen there, eyes wide, with just the smallest tic in his cheek. As he stares back at Harvey, it all falls into place, how Harvey always puffs himself up around Mike, striving to establish his superiority but it’s never about the superiority, is it? It’s all about impressing Mike, showing off for Mike, staying in Mike’s good graces, making Mike happy.

It’s all about Mike.

He looks at Harvey, at not just his infuriatingly perfect cheekbones and mouth and hair, but at the frown that embedded itself in his forehead the moment Mike announced his departure. Harvey’s cheeks are hollower, too, and there are webs of little wrinkles around the sides of his eyes and shadows underneath, as if the past few weeks have aged him a few decades. He hasn’t looked this exhausted since Mike was in prison.

A laugh nearly rips out of Louis, a laugh at the strangeness of the greatest closer in the city somehow missing the greatest opportunity of his life, but he drags the sound back into his throat. Harvey’s probably followed this precise train of thought a hundred times already, he doesn’t need someone else to point out the ironies.

Louis understands all this more quickly than he’d like to.

At first, he wants to tell Harvey to confess all this to Mike, but he suppresses that impulse too, because sometimes confession isn’t an option. Sometimes love is doomed to be quiet and unrequited.

He knows it’s impossible to make Harvey happy in such dire circumstances, but still he has to try. “You should go to sleep.” Harvey starts to roll his eyes again, but Louis raises a hand to stop his protest. “Tomorrow’s a tough day, you don’t want to do something you’ll regret. Let me have a crack at the speech.”

He raises his eyebrows so high he must sprain something. “You?”

“Me. I’ll get you a draft by 5am. If you hate it, you can edit it or scrap it and rewrite tomorrow.”

It’s more a sign of exhaustion than trust, he knows, that Harvey doesn’t mock the idea. Instead he gives Louis a somber nod and pulls himself off the couch, saying, “I’ve got notes in my office.”

“I’ll use them.”

Harvey nods and leaves with a weighty sigh.

* * *

Now it’s just Louis, alone in Harvey’s office with a blank page and a haphazard pile of index cards.

 _“A lie is a very poor way to say hello, but for you, Mike? I knew I had to make an exception.”_ That’s the third Star Trek quote Louis has spotted; he’s been watching Star Trek again, trying to see what fascinates Harvey. Chuckling, he keeps flipping through and finds the cards overflow with compliments for Mike, for his intellect, his kindness, his grit, his sense of humor. These are compliments Louis could only dream of receiving from Harvey, even if he had actually gone through with one of his weddings . . .

He shakes himself from his reverie and keeps looking. He reads anecdotes about steak dinners and top gun pilots and superheroes, and look— there’s Louis’ name, in jokes about him, and not even particularly mean ones! He can’t stop grinning as he reads them over and over.

Rachel’s name appears rarely, more rarely than Louis’. The second time he sees it he’s reached the last card: “ _You once stormed into my apartment at an ungodly hour and asked me to explain how I handle love. I told you I keep my personal life the hell away from my business, but you never listen to a thing I say, so now you’re with Rachel and I”_

The sentence broke off.

There are flashes of brilliance in the notes, yet the main insights come from what’s not written. Arranging the cards into a neat stack and depositing them on the far edge of Harvey’s table, Louis sighs, realizing there’s almost nothing he can use there, not for a wedding where Mike marries someone else.

Harvey’s simply come up with 55.8 ways to say, “I love you.”

Nonetheless refusing to let Harvey down, Louis opens his browser window and starts searching for allusions, because he’s going to do this right, he’s going to do Harvey justice, and the references are a crucial part of Harvey Specter’s charisma. They’re the little game he plays with those lucky enough to break into his inner circle, as they all flaunt their knowledge– but not along typical high society lines, he’ll never let a ballet reference slip past his lips– and verify their own cleverness. Louis has tried for years to join the game, to watch the movies and memorize the sports teams, and it never works for long.

(But the sparkling moments where it does– oh, Louis will sit through another ten action films for just one moment.)

Thanks to his previous explorations of Harvey’s favorite media, he’s got some ideas right off the bat, and he knows where to look for more– action films, classic TV shows, jazz standards, popular sports. He starts off broad, searching for “romantic movie quotes,” and lands on a Buzzfeed listicle with 36 options, that’ll have to be helpful . . .

“We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”

Louis rapidly scans the rest of the list– it ends with “I wish I knew how to quit you”– and closes out of the tab with unnecessary force. Reverting to IMDB quote lists, he compiles a set of references, all clever and funny and fitting. Vowing not to repeat Harvey’s mistake– one of his mistakes– he next makes a list of all the reasons he likes Rachel, all the reasons why he can imagine her and Mike happily married. He writes a few short couplets about Mike and Rachel’s love story and then expands them into prose, erasing the Shakespearean flourishes so they could be Harvey Specter’s words.

Still, Harvey won’t survive without at least _some_ mention of Mike, so Louis at last selects stories of Mike and Harvey, some he’s observed from the periphery, some he’s taking from the notecards. He makes sure to include a joke at his own expense– Harvey refers at one point to discussing Louis’ “codpiece or lack thereof,” and while Louis can’t imagine the original context it makes him smile even on the third read, and so it’ll make the speech.

He has an outline by 1am.

He stands, stretches, fills his trademarked “You Just Got Litt Up!” mug with coffee from the executive kitchen, and then returns to his work. He pulls out his trusty Dictaphone and plays a few clips of Harvey’s voice– “Louis, you’re the man”– and luxuriates in that caramel voice. He closes his eyes and re-commits the rhythms of Harvey’s speech to memory, though it may just be unnecessary, downright self-indulgent by this point.

Then he begins to write.

He removes Harvey’s longing for Mike from the speech, softening it into the Platonic warmth he himself feels for the bride and groom. At the same time, he infuses the speech with classic Harvey Specter humor and confidence. He writes lines he’d never pull off himself, but that he knows Harvey can. Harvey will just throw them out to the audience with an easy smirk, skating that fine line between arrogant and endearing more skillfully than Louis ever has.

Louis has a full draft at a quarter past three, but he keeps editing, refining, pushing past his exhaustion to do better, better, because nothing is quite good enough for Harvey Specter. He keeps going, for the sake of the magical moment where Harvey will break the quiet of the reception and speak Louis’ words aloud, turning them to music. Finally, he emails a speech at 4:30 and stumbles into a taxi, instructing the driver to go to his apartment. He’s stumbling over his words too at this point, he’s so weary he must sound drunk, and he dozes off in the cab until a “ping” on his phone rouses him at 4:58.

Harvey’s sent him a text.

_“This is much better than I expected”_

At 4:59:  _"Thanks_ ”

Happiness jolts through Louis. Even after he’s made it into his house and set his alarm and fallen asleep with his dress shirt still on, a soft smile lingers.

* * *

He wakes at one that afternoon, not because of the alarm, but because his cellphone is vibrating incessantly. He picks it up and finds a string of texts from Donna.

“ _Hey, have you seen Harvey_ ”

“ _He’s late and not picking up his phone_ ”

“ _Nvm, he just came_ ”

“ _Hang on_ ”

“ _What is happening_ ”

“ _He’s walking in with a bouquet of orchids_ ”

“ _He just took the bouquet in /to Mike/_ ”

Louis leaps out of bed, throws on the suit he had picked out for the wedding, and drives to the Plaza as fast as he legally can. At first, he follows the delicately lettered white-and-gold signs for the Zane-Ross wedding. Then he just follows the sound of raised voices.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” That’s Robert Zane’s voice thundering, and Louis’ steps hasten. “They’ve known each other seven years.”

“Trust me,” Harvey replies, “I’d have sped this up if I could.”

When Louis walks in, Robert Zane is facing Harvey in the middle of the Plaza ballroom, empty except for the fifty tables all set with china and crystal for the reception dinner. Louis stops in his tracks as Robert takes a threatening step forward, right into Harvey’s personal space. “If you think you’re going to break up my daughter’s wedding again–”

“Last time wasn’t actually my fault,” Harvey spits, “but if you think your daughter should marry someone who left their wedding after I gave him a twenty-minute counterargument, then I’m not the one who’s crazy here.”

“What the hell did you say to him?”

“Nothing but the truth. He’s a rational adult, he made up his own mind.”

“Rational?” Robert growls. “I’ll show you rational–”

He raises a fist, Harvey’s already darting a step back, and on instinct Louis shouts, “Don’t you dare!”

They turn to look at him. Harvey’s demeanor changes, and he gives Louis a small smile, cocky, just slightly asymmetrical.

“Goodbye, Robert,” he says, straightening up and striding right out towards Louis, and Robert just watches him go, cursing under his breath.

Harvey’s still smirking as he comes up to Louis.

“What the hell did you do?”

“I just broke up a wedding,” Harvey says with a surprisingly blithe shrug. “I’d feel much worse if I thought the marriage would have lasted the year.”

Harvey’s speeding away from the ballroom now, towards the main Plaza doors, and Louis hurries to stay by him. “But why?”

“I took your advice,” Harvey tells him. “This was bound to be a rough day no matter what, so I decided to avoid doing anything I’d regret.”

“Like letting Mike marry his fiancee?”

“Exactly.”

“But what the hell counterargument did you use?”

“I took your advice,” Harvey says, now grinning outright, his joy seemingly irrepressible. “I was honest.”

Of course. Nothing but the truth, and the whole truth that Harvey Specter’s been in love with him for the better part of a decade. How could any man resist?

They stop outside on the sidewalk, and Louis is grateful, his legs feel too heavy for another step.

“Really, Louis,” Harvey says, facing him with a gentle smile, “I have to thank you.”

He starts to turn away.

“Where are you going?”

“To Mike, obviously.”

He quietly watches Harvey walk away.

* * *

A millennium later, he pulls out his phone and messages Donna. “ _Where is she?_ ”

“ _She left, don’t know where_ ”

“ _What the hell does he think he’s doing,_ ” she texts seconds later.

He doesn’t answer, overcome by happiness. This wave of emotion is happiness, it must be. And if it’s currently clogging his throat it might be mixed with the slightest jealousy for the greatest closer in the city, one who just crashed into a love story that’s not his and upturned a deal that’s been settled for years, apparently through sleep deprivation and sheer force of will.

If Harvey and Mike get married, will Louis be their best man?

Once again, a vaguely manic laugh tries to bubble up in Louis’ throat, and he lets it escape in a high-pitched giggle as he walks back into the Plaza, honing in on the closest alcohol he knows of.

He finds Rachel there, in the Plaza Champagne Bar, an elegant, quiet room adorned with chandeliers and golden curtains. She’s dressed casually in a blouse and jeans, but her hair is still pulled back in a picture-perfect bun, with small ringlets framing her face. She’s sitting alone on an ivory chair, staring down into a teacup.

When he approaches, she snorts. “Can I buy you a real drink?”

“I–”

“I’m treating myself to a half-bottle of the Krug Grande Cuvée,” she interrupts, “and someone should probably stop me from downing it all in five minutes.”

“Uh– okay.” He sits down opposite her.

“It’s what we were serving for the wedding toast,” she adds a few seconds later.

The corners of her lips twitch as she says it, and Louis is reminded of patience on a monument, smiling at grief, even as the same green and yellow melancholy descends on him. They sit in silence until their drinks come and Rachel takes a long sip of her champagne, looking around the room at everything and nothing.

“He’s happier now than I’ve seen in months,” she finally observes, looking over Louis’ shoulder. “That’s what matters, right?”

He doesn’t give her an answer. Instead, he sips his own drink, considering the possibility that apparently confession is sometimes the best option available.

Still, he suspects, other loves are doomed to quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> The [Buzzfeed listicle](https://www.buzzfeed.com/niaalavezos/most-romantic-movie-quotes-of-all-time) is real.
> 
> Someone plagiarized part of this fic. This is the original.


End file.
